1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to a print management system, a distributed printing system, and a method for managing a distributed printing system.
2. Description of the Background Art
In the digital printing industry, in order to build a mechanism to make a profit from multi-type, small-lot printing, effective print workflows using networks such as Web2Print and online calibration have been introduced. In addition, in the digital printing industry, as the number of ordered copies is large, the most rapid printing available is required. In order to solve this problem, a so-called hybrid workflow technique involving comprehensively managing and efficiently operating multiple output devices on the output side (including those in different places, for example, different branches or at an affiliated printing company) is already known.
However, in the above-described hybrid workflow, when a print engine assigned as an output destination printer stops during operation, since any given printing job is assigned to multiple output printers not located near a server, throughput decreases and the output device owner must take emergency repairs.
In a printing system as proposed in JP-2006-155017-A, in order to process printing as rapidly as possible, a management device (server) generates and manages page description language (PDL), intermediate data (e.g., portable document format (PDF)), and raster image data from input data, and outputs the most suitable intermediate print data from among these when a print command is input. This printing system is similar to the present invention in that the management device (server) prepares processed data in advance so that the rapid printing can process. However, the problem described above remains unresolved: Once the print engine assigned as the output destination printer stops in the middle of printing, throughput is decreased and the output device owner must undertake urgent repairs.